Samsung to spend big on future growth in semiconductors

South Korean tech giant Samsung has announced big plans to expand to meet the growing demands of todayâ€™s hardware market and to continue expanding in the future. The company is the worldâ€™s second largest chipmaker now and plans to spend a massive $33 billion in the next seven years on factories to meet rising demand for products like the Personal Computers and digital gadgets.

The company believes that the sales of such semiconductors would expand to $61 billion by 2012 with the plans of the company to construct eight manufacturing plants and one research center. Samsung specializes in manufacturing memory chips and is preparing to catch on with rivals Intel in the $213 billion semiconductor industry. Interestingly, financial reports prove that Samsung is spending much more on investments than Intel.

Even the market analysts believe that such capital expenditure is crucial to stay afloat in this highly specialized market and the way Samsung is growing, it would be hard for smaller players in the market to compete at the advanced levels with the company. They are already being accused of playing on favorable terms with Apple on sales of Flash memory chips enabling them to price their iPod products quite cheap. The company puts the low prices of these storage medium on large manufacturing levels and huge sales to the company.

Samsung also said that the expansion into its Hwaseong complex would help create 14,000 jobs in Korea by 2012.